Thursday 31 January 2019

Dreamscape - Speed Tests

"Sleeping Beauty" (HB pencil on 63mm x 35mm card)
 
For the past few weeks, I've been working towards producing a short video on the Dreamscaping technique of automatic drawing (surrealist automatism). I realised that I couldn't do these at the current scale that I usually do them, which is near postcard size, as that would take far too long. So I needed a more acceptable size that I could view with the limited videoing equipment that I have, which is just the video function on my compact camera. In the end, I opted for 63mm x 35mm. The reason it's so specific is because I simply used a piece of off-cut card which looked the right size and drew around it as a template.
 
Before any video could be made, I had to time myself doing a piece this size. The first one was "Sleeping Beauty" shown above, but even at that size, I found myself getting carried away with it and forgetting the time limitations I needed for it. In the end, it took 1 hour, ten minutes to do. It's a good little piece, showing the remnants of a broken-down android forever staring at another amongst all the other refuse, but the time it took was way over the 30 minute limit I had in mind for them, so the work had to be more sketchy.
 
Now, a quick sketch is easy to do. A few minutes is all it would take. The internet is filled with videos of people doing just that, but the Dreamscape technique I use takes just a little more time.
 
"Elven Harassment" (HB pencil on 63mm x 35mm card)
 
"Elven Harassment" is more of a sketch in quality, but does its job, as it took 28 minutes to do. I've no idea what's going on in that image, but I do like the fact that the elf looks as if she's about to punch him. The final video I'll be making, obviously, won't be around that timeframe. It will be sped-up to around 3 minutes, but should clearly show the techniques used and the randomness of the image produced.
 
It's still a work in progress....
 

No comments: